Understanding Part Complexity: A Novel Approach for the Identification of Complexity-Influencing Part Characteristics

Machine tool manufacturers must understand the requirements of their customers to survive in challenging markets, e.g. by understanding their customers’ order characteristics. We want to explore part complexity as a measure to fill this gap of data-based customer information. This paper presents the procedure that we developed for part complexity assessment and is centered around expert consultation and the results from implementing this procedure at our industry partner, a machine tool manufacturer for sheet metal processing. Our contributions are (1) a literature review on part complexity and assessment approaches, (2) a definition of part complexity, (3) a tried-and-tested procedure for the assessment of part complexity including an online tool, (4) 80 sheet metal processing geometries, (5) codebooks containing the relevant part characteristics to assess part complexity of an exemplary production unit, (6) detailed explanation of the labeling results for three geometries, and (7) refinements for enabling transferring the labeling results to new geometries using a classification algorithm.